Roshamboot

Rock beats server

It has been some time since I last wrote a blog post and a large portion of that is because for the longest time I’ve been wanting to move it off of wordpress and onto something else that is a little more lightweight and easier to work with.
I finally decided to bite the bullet and move it to hugo hosted out of an S3 bucket, so here’s a guide on how to do that.

I recently spent far more time than I would care to admit trying to work out how to use cross account roles to access an S3 bucket that had many files written by different AWS accounts resulting in a *soup* of ACL’s. A large part of this time burnt was because I couldn’t find an idiots guide to cross-account roles, so here is what I hope to be a thorough explanation of how to use cross-account roles to access an S3 bucket in a different account.

Docker is an awesome tool for packing things into easily deployable artefacts, it also chews up disk space like a world record holding eating champion and doesn’t have any obvious method for removing junk you probably don’t need any more. So here are a couple of quick commands that can be used to clean up after it.
The first one is to remove any containers that aren’t running.
docker rm $(docker ps -a -q) The secone one is to remove any images that are not currently tagged or attached to a tagged instance.

I’ve tried before to set up a windows workstation so that I could get the best out of both worlds when it comes to productivity, but I’ve always had less than stellar results. It’s tough enjoying working on both sides of the technology fence. For the first time ever though I have found a successful set up that allows me the majority of the tools I had become accustomed to using in a fairly agnostic fashion.

Much like heartbleed before it, if you operate in the open source world you have probably heard about shellshock by now and dedicated a large portion of the last 24 hours trying to mitigate it. In the unlikely event that you somehow missed the massive bash security vulnerability you can find more information here:
http://www.csoonline.com/article/2687265/application-security/remote-exploit-in-bash-cve-2014-6271.html
the tldr version of the bug is that any application allows a remote entity to populate an environment variable allows the attacker to execute a bash function on the target server.

It’s not often we radically change the kind of industry we work in, in my case I’ve recently moved from the physical retail sector to the digital advertising sector (the kind of advertising that tries to solve a problem rather than the kind that is a problem). I’ve also moved from being a traditional operations engineer to the devops kind, the combination of the industry and the role shift has been an interesting experience.

Today is the day that I officially cease support for all of my current projects. I was lucky enough for one of my new projects to find a new home with a contributor who has been a tremendous help over the last six months in weeding out problems with my Netapp C-Mode monitoring plugin, you can find the latest releases of the project on Willem’s github you can find the latest release of the project here.

This week has been a week of change, though the biggest changes are yet to come. Next month I’ll be finishing up at my current job and moving on to different shores, which means a number of things for this little space of the Internet I’ve carved out.
On the plus side there’s likely to be a lot more posts on newer technologies, particularly web technologies. On the downside there’s likely to be a drop in the amount of Nagios… that’s not to say that it will be going away entirely but there will definitely be a large focus shift.

Today was meant to be the day that I triumphantly announced 0.5 of my check_netapp_ontapi.pl plugin was complete… and then I discovered that I had been running the wrong rc of the script in my test environment. Whoops. I’ve decided to create a fork of the project with the latest version anyway and as part of my next update I should merge it back into the main repository if all goes well.

The Rub I mentioned in my last post about the heartbleed vulnerability that I had been working with the Microsofts MVC 5 framework. MVC is one of those frameworks I’ve tried to come to terms with previously but never really had a reason to actually learn the in’s, out’s and why’s… though recently I did receive a compelling demonstration from a Microsoft employee and decided that I would have to give Microsoft’s flavour a shot while I was upgrading one of my employers applications.